Shakespeare

Shakespeare at Cornerstone

The entire population of Cornerstone Christian Academy devotes an entire month to studying Shakespeare. Younger grades hear summaries of Shakespearean tales in read-aloud form, and they memorize sonnets and dialogues. Middle-grade students read prose abridgments of plays, and fifth and sixth graders venture into the original texts. Hands-on activities spotlight the culture of Elizabethan era, including its architecture, clothing, food, pastimes, and occupations. Timelines enable students to relate incidents in the plays to real-life events from various epochs of history. The celebration of the Bard of Avon culminates during the final week with a daylong festival.

Purposes
Shakespeare stands alone among writers of English for his enduring appeal. Shakespeare’s thirty eight plays and more than one hundred fifty poems establish Shakespeare as the foremost literary talent of his own Elizabethan Age and, even more impressively, as a genius whose creative achievement has never been surpassed in any age.

Our study of Shakespeare contributes to many of our successes. Cornerstone’s superior reading scores and the many successes of our students in vocabulary competitions are, in part, because of the rigor of studying and understanding Shakespeare.

Students who have been exposed to William Shakespeare from the earliest age have been given a gift of language, of ideas and thoughts, of wonder and beauty. Elizabeth Nesbit had this to say about the works of Shakespeare: He was familiar with all the beautiful forms and images, with all that is sweet and majestic in the simple aspects of nature, of that indestructible love of flowers and fragrance, and dews, and clear waters - and soft airs and sounds, and bright skies and woodland solitudes, and moonlit bowers, which are the material elements of poetry, - and with that fine sense of their indefinable relation to mental emotion, which is its essence and vivifying soul - and which, in the midst of his most busy and tragic scenes, falls like gleams of sunshine on rocks and ruins….”

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